What a giant leap forward! Lexis/Nexis has signed contracts with prisons to make computerized legal research available to prisoners. For these prisoners, it means an end to outdated lawbooks, often with missing pages. Lexis is up to the minute, and for a non-lawyer, much easier to use than a law book. The prisoner can type in a subject to search for rather than leafing through volumes whose organizational framework is a mystery. This also saves prisons a lot of money as books are more expensive.

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An investigation is underway in California into the death of Khem Singh, a 72 year-old crippled, Sikh priest from India who died of starvation. After being brutalized by a prison guard, Mr. Singh would not leave his cell for meals or medical visits. Fellow inmates wrote letters and filed complaints about his condition and officials did nothing. His weight dropped to 80 pounds. Now, he is dead.

Prison officials said Friday that they would talk to the inmates and review their letters and complaints as part of a growing investigation into Singh's death. The case coincides with increased scrutiny of California's vast prison system, which is riddled with accusations of brutality, coverups, fraud and poor medical care.

At Corcoran, Singh's condition took a turn for the worse early this year. Some correctional officers went to the prison's medical staff to express their own concerns, according to Romero, but logbooks show that no medical technician, nurse or doctor followed up and treated him in his cell. "Mr. Singh has not left his cell to go to eat — not once," the inmate wrote to Romero in a Feb. 11 letter. "They do not bring him any food. None. I smuggle bread back.... Mr. Singh is gentle, polite. I am ashamed it took me so long to speak out."

The guard who supervised the cellblock — the same one suspected of having assaulted Singh — is alleged to have told another inmate not to bother speaking out on behalf of the starving inmate. "Forget it; he's going to die," the inmate quoted the guard as telling him, according to Romero. A few days later, after collapsing in his cell, Singh died of lung and heart failure caused by starvation.

There's more:

by TChris

For many years, the philosophy that prisons should be harshly punitive has prevailed in state governments. Year after year, legislatures sliced rehabilitative programs from state budgets as conservatives mocked a perceived liberal desire to coddle criminals. This bleak view of prison life has been embraced by most prison administrators, who seek only to run a prison with the ruthless efficiency of a cattle farm, albeit with fewer privileges for the human cattle.

Most wardens strive only to control and house their share of the nation's growing prison population, which, in the last 20-odd years, has quadrupled, to 2.1 million people. In California, the word ''rehabilitation'' was expunged from the penal code's mission statement in 1976. Since then, prison officials have been exhorted to punish, and they have fulfilled that mandate in new, highly secure prisons, devoid of anything that could lead to accusations of pampering inmates.

Read about San Quentin Warden Jeanne Woodford and her courageous effort to buck this dehumanizing trend. Her work reflects her belief that people can change if given some help, and that people will only perpetuate their past mistakes (at an increasing cost to everyone else) if society doesn't help them change. With little support from the state government, Woodford found ways to give meaning to the lives of San Quentin inmates.

The prison was bustling with purposeful activity. In the education building, inmates studied for their high-school equivalency examinations and college degrees. In factories, they learned to operate computer-controlled lathes, printing presses and milling machines. Two men pruned a Monterey Cypress tree in the chapel yard. Prisoners in a fathering course practiced reading Dr. Seuss to one another.

Woodford doesn't mind being judged "a naive, criminal-coddling do-gooder." Good for her. And good for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for selecting her to run the state's out-of-control Department of Corrections.

In 1990, former Panamian dictator Manuel Noriega was sentenced in federal court in Florida to 30 years in prison for drug smuggling. Because his crimes pre-dated 1987, he wasn't sentenced under federal guidelines but was given a sentence that included release on parole. He was denied parole twice, and requested another consideration.

He has just been denied parole again. This time, the federal judge who sentenced him, William Hoeveler, wrote a letter to the Parole Commission advocating parole for Noriega, who is now 70 years old. It is the first time the Judge made such a recommendation in his 27years as a Judge.

Under the old parole guidelines, Noriega can be made to serve 20 of his 30 years. However, the parole commission, in its discretion, can grant him early release Noriega's attorney, Frank Rubino, has promised to appeal:

Rubino said the U.S. attorney's office in Miami and the Department of Justice in Washington continue to politicize Noriega's case. Noriega was arrested in late 1989 on orders from President George Bush.

Noriega has a private apartment-style cell in Florida. He's 70 years old. Do we really need to continue paying for his upkeep and medical care? We say, parole Mr. Noriega now.

We've received an e-mail saying TalkLeft was just mentioned on Fox News:

fox just mentioned your site. it was in regards to the martha stewart story. Noted how she made political contributions to hillary clinton and that the money wont be returned. then said martha would lose her voting rights. that the only two states which allow felons to vote are maine and vermont (i think that's incorrect). fox then claimed that you said if felons were allowed to vote 75% (?) would vote democrat.

Our last count shows that 37 states allow felons who have served their sentences to vote. We did see the two state reference in a January 8, National Review column (available on Lexis.com), but it is in reference to states with some form of restrictions:

Forty-eight states currently have some form of restriction on the right of felons to vote. The exceptions are Maine and Vermont, which even permit inmates to vote. Thirty-three states disenfranchise felons who are on parole. Eight states deny felons the right to vote for life.

Felon disenfranchisement is an important issue to us.

Here's our post urging the Dems to go after these votes. As to the 75% figure, we quoted from a July 18, 2003 Los Angeles Times op-ed by Christopher Uggen, an associate professor of sociology at the, University of Minnesota, and Jeff Manza, an associate professor of sociology and political science at Northwestern University, who are co-authors of the forthcoming "Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement, and American Democracy" (Oxford University Press). (LA Times article available on Lexis.com):

Low-income voters are also overrepresented in prisons, and they too tend to vote Democratic. This effect is not just on the fringes. Our estimates show that at least seven of every 10 votes cast by these lost felon voters would go to Democratic candidates. In the 2000 presidential election, more than 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting because of felon disenfranchisement laws across the country. Of those, 35% had already served their time. [our emphasis]

Our work suggests that if [Florida's] 613,000 former felons had been permitted to vote — and even if you factor in a far-lower-than-expected turnout rate than the general population — Al Gore would have defeated George W. Bush by about 60,000 votes and would have been elected president. What's more, if all U.S. felons — in and out of prison — had been allowed to vote, Gore might have carried the nation by more than 1 million votes.

Uggen's and Manza's report was also published in the Summer 2003 edition of Contexts, an American Sociological Association magazine.

Bump and Update: Here's a Fox News article dated tomorrow--it calls TalkLeft an "internet group" and makes it sound like it was our study, not Uggen's and Manza's, that comes up with the 70% number. We're told that it was Fox's campaign correspondent, Carl Cameron, who mentioned TalkLeft on Shepherd Smith's Studio B show.

A new fifty-minute documentary, Life on the Outside, explores problems facing those who leave prison or jail to return home and re-integrate back to their communities. It offers strategies for meeting those challenges. You can view a video clip here.

Does this sound like a suicide to you?

His family was horrified at the face staring up from the open casket. Kenneth Trentadue's forehead was blackened and bruised. His eyes were blood-marked, his left eye swollen shut. His cheeks were puffed and scraped and cut. His jaw was rubbed red. The family ordered the Orange County undertaker to strip the body and wipe away the makeup. Then they saw the rest — his battered head, his gouged throat, his arms and legs, hands and wrists, even the bottoms of his feet, all covered in deep, ugly wounds.

Kent Trentadue died in 1995. He was a small-time offender, a drug user in jail on a parole violation for a burglary charge. Authorities claimed he hanged himself. He had been arrested in San Diego and pleaded guilty to a drunk driving offense. Because he was on federal parole for a burglary, he was transferred back to the federal receiving center in Oklahoma pending a parole revocation hearing. If he lost, he was only looking at 16 months. He got to Oklahoma on Friday, and was found dead on Monday.

by TChris

Happy Anniversary, California. It's been ten years since you enacted one of the nation's toughest "three strikes" laws. Are you comforted to know that your state is so much safer now than it was ten years ago?

With 57 percent of the third strikes being nonviolent offenses, typically drug violations or burglary, the law largely hasn't necessarily targeted the most dangerous criminals. Third strikes are 10 times more likely to be for a drug offense than for second-degree murder. In fact, third-strikers sent to prison on a drug offense outnumber the combined total whose offense was assault, rape and second-degree murder, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy group that has been critical of the law.

The institute's 10-year analysis of the law also found African Americans and Latinos were far more likely to be imprisoned than white offenders for the same third-strike crimes.

One quarter of California prisoners are serving life terms under the three-strikes law, at a cost so far of about $8.1 billion. More than half that amount was spent to warehouse offenders whose third strike was not a violent crime.

So the law is expensive, it wastes prison resources on people who don't deserve life sentences, and it seems to be implemented in a racially discriminatory manner. California, is that what you intended?

"We're filling our prisons with people who don't belong there,'' said Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, whose reform attempts have been routinely rebuffed. "You can get less time for second-degree murder than for stealing a six-pack of beer. It's not what the public had in mind.''

by TChris

As politically popular as it has been for legislators to "get tough on crime" by increasing maximum sentences, imposing mandatory minimums, creating "three strikes" laws, and generally encouraging incarceration as the first and best solution to crime, there are consequences to soaring prison populations. Some of the consequences are financial, as states with faltering economies try to pay for new prison beds. But when states ignore the financial problems and simply jam more inmates into existing spaces, crisis is inevitable.

That is the lesson learned in Arizona, where a panel studying a standoff with prisoners criticized the "chronic underfunding," inadequate training, and staff shortages at state prisons.

Many of the problems that contributed to a 15-day prison hostage situation resulted from "years worth of bad decisions by the Department of Corrections at all levels," investigators said in a draft review obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

While the panel made several recommendations, many of which require increased funding, it would be wise to consider whether the prison environment could be improved by releasing to community supervision those inmates who don't need to be in prison. Many inmates who serve time for drug or other nonviolent offenses are consuming scarce correctional resources that would be better devoted to those who, for society's protection, actually need to be behind bars.

We thought there was more to the story of Bush's pardon of his dying, convicted pal a few weeks ago, and now there is new information . This week there is even more information at LA Weekly .

George Bush does almost no pardons. They’re labor-intensive, entail considerable political risk and provide little political or pecuniary gain. At 12, he’s about to set a record for the modern presidency. That’s only nine more than the number of turkeys he’s pardoned in the annual pre-Thanksgiving ritual.

Remember the S&L collapse. You’re still paying for it. No one knows the final tab, $300 billion to $500 billion in taxpayer-funded bonds to be retired in the future. More than half that was a transfer payment out of the pockets of taxpayers in the other 49 states and into insolvent S&Ls and bloated real estate deals in the Great State. Texas led the nation in failed S&Ls with 237,

This just in from North Carolina--a death row inmate who won a new trial has been acquitted by a jury and freed.

A prisoner taken off death row after a judge ruled prosecutors withheld key evidence in his murder trial was found not guilty Wednesday in a second trial.Alan Gell, 28, has spent a decade behind bars in the 1995 murder of retired truck driver Allen Ray Jenkins, who was shot twice during a robbery. After the verdict, Gell hugged his attorneys and his mother wept in the courtroom.

He was immediately allowed to go free. When asked what he was going to do, he responded: "Go home, where I should have been years ago."....Asked whether he harbors hard feelings against the state, Gell replied, "No comment. As you all know, there was some misconduct."

But prosecutors in Gell's original trial withheld from defense lawyers a secretly taped phone call in which Morris, who was then 15 years old, did not answer when her boyfriend asked her twice whether Gell killed Jenkins. She also told her boyfriend she had to "make up a story" about Jenkins' death. Also withheld by prosecutors were statements from more than a dozen witnesses who said they saw Jenkins alive after April 3. Gell was either out of state or in jail on a car-theft charge from April 4 until after Jenkins' body was found April 14.

Kudos to Colorado librarian Susan Oakes for bringing this innovative program to inmates and their children:

Arapahoe County librarian Susan Oakes provides a small bright spot for some of the prisoners and their families. For 25 years, she's been finding ways to inspire people to read, and five years ago she started Begin With Books, in which Arapahoe County Jail inmates have a chance to share reading with their children. "I don't believe these children should suffer for any of the choices their parents have made," Oakes said.

Depending on inmates' level of privileges, they can select books to send home, record their voices reading the books, or call home during story time. Inmate Sean Bolsinger's son was born in August. The program enables him to be involved from behind bars.

A few weeks ago, Oakes learned that those programs had won her a prestigious award. She's one of 27 librarians across the country to receive the 2003 New York Times Librarian Award.

We hope librarians reading this post will bring the program to their communities.